Monsters and Revolutionaries
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Notes Preface: Bitter Sugar's Island Arundhati Roy, The God a/Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 53. In 1963 a documentary film was shot in Reunion. It was called Sucre Amer ("Bitter Sugar"; the title was inspired by Bitter Rice) and received an award at the Berlin Film Festival. The French government forbade the film's distribution in French territory (metropolitan and postcolonial). 1 Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Plume Book, 1988), pp. 79- 80. 2 This is how the Haitian thinker Patrick Bellegarde-Smith put it at the Conference on Pan-Africanism Revisited, Pomona College, 9 April 1988. Cited in Fran,oise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 6. 3 Ibid. 4 See, for instance, the issue of Dedale 5-6 (spring 1997), "Postcolo- nialisme: Decentrement, Deplacement, Dissemination." 5 Homi Bhabha, "Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations," Critical Inquiry 23 (spring 1997): p. 434. 6 With its 600,000 inhabitants, Reunion is the most populated of the French overseas departments. The total population of the French overseas departments is 1,459,000. 7 The first colonial empire was constituted before the French Revolution.